Replication Data for: The Fingerprints of Fraud: Evidence from Mexico's 1988 Election

This paper investigates the incentives and opportunities for non-democratic regimes to rely on fraud during the 1988 presidential election in Mexico. In particular, I study how the alteration of vote returns came after an electoral reform that centralized the vote-counting process. Using an original image database of the vote-tally sheets for that election, and applying Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to analyze the sheets, I find evidence of blatant alterations in about a third of the tallies in the country. The empirical analysis shows that altered tallies were more prevalent in polling stations where the opposition was not present and in states controlled by governors with grassroots experience of managing the electoral operation. This research has implications for understanding the ways in which autocrats control elections as well as introducing a new methodology to audit the integrity of vote tallies.